Brinker
receives DOE's most prestigious award
C. Jeff
Brinker, professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering and Chemistry
at UNM, has been named one of seven recipients of the E.O. Lawrence
Award, U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham recently announced.
The awards
will be presented at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on Monday,
Oct. 28. Each recipient will receive a gold medal, a citation
and $25,000.
The award
is given for outstanding contributions in the field of atomic
energy, which today influences many fields of science such as
environmental research, materials science and nuclear medicine
that were in their infancy when the first Lawrence Award was
given.
The Lawrence
Award was established in 1959 to honor the memory of the late
Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence who invented the cyclotron (a particle
accelerator) and after whom two major Energy Department laboratories
in Berkeley and Livermore, Calif., are named. The award is given
in seven categories for outstanding contributions in the field
of atomic energy, broadly defined.
Brinker
will receive the award in the Materials Research category for
his innovations in sol-gel chemistry to create nanostructured
materials that have applications to energy, manufacturing, defense
and medicine.
Brinker
is also the co-director of the Center for Micro-Engineered Materials
at UNM and a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.
He recently was elected into the National Academy of Engineering
(NAE). Election to NAE is one of the highest professional distinctions
that can be accorded to an engineer.
Im
of course extremely honored to be the recipient of the E.O.
Lawrence Award. This award recognizes rather recent research
accomplishments as opposed to being a lifetime achievement
award, Brinker said.
Id
like to give credit to the fantastic students and post-docs
who have worked with me over the past several years on topics
like aerogels and self-assembled porous and composite nanostructures,
he said. Id also like to acknowledge the collaboration
between the Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering,
the Center for Micro-Engineered Materials, Sandia, and the Advanced
Materials Lab, which has created a fertile, provocative research
environment needed to foster creative interdisciplinary materials
research.
Other recipients
are from the Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, MD;
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; Stanford
University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC),
Stanford, Calif.; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley,
Calif.; North Carolina State University, Raleigh.
We
are all enriched by the contributions these researchers have
made ranging from understanding the genetic code to measuring
the expansion of the universe itself, Abraham said.